The subject matter disclosed herein relates to a method for communication between plural programs which operate on a client processing apparatus (computer) such as a cellular phone, a car navigation system and a PC, and a server program which operates on a server processing apparatus (computer) coupled to the client processing apparatus via a network.
A user of an Android terminal can freely install an application program from a market on the Internet. The installed application program independently performs communication with a server via the network in accordance with necessity.
Japanese Published Unexamined Patent Application No. 2009-157648 discloses a communication method in which, when plural programs, so-called widgets, operating on a client processing apparatus, respectively perform communication with a server, and requests outputted from the widgets are stored in a buffer provided in a client terminal. Then, when the buffer becomes full or a buffering period is expired, the requests stored in the buffer are transmitted at once toward the server. When response data is received from the server, the received data is analyzed, the widget that issued the request is specified and the response data is returned to the widget. In this manner, it is possible to suppress the frequency of occurrence of network communication and prevent increment in communication traffic.
In use of an application program obtained using the Android terminal from the Android market, cooperative operation between individually-obtained application programs can be realized.
However, since communication between an application program and the server is independently performed by an application program, when data transmission/reception communication occurs many times, the performance may be degraded due to transmission/reception processing load.
When the method disclosed in Japanese Published Unexamined Patent Application No. 2009-157648 is used, since requests are temporarily stored in a buffer and the requests are not transmitted until the buffer becomes full or the buffering period is expired, the amount of communication can be reduced. However, it is possible that reception of a response is delayed when a request from an application program is not immediately issued.